TechEye |  |
- British geezer charged with spying
- Microsoft board member has conflict of interest
- Apple growth is just so yesterday
- HP sues optical drive makers
- UK prime minister threatens to censor press
| British geezer charged with spying Posted: 29 Oct 2013 02:37 AM PDT A British man has been arrested in England and charged by the United States and Britain with hacking into US government computer systems. The New York Daily News is reporting how the systems that Lauri Love and three co-conspirators hacked into included the Pentagon's Missile Defense (sic) Agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US space agency NASA and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Love, 28, and the unnamed co-conspirators, including two in Australia and one in Sweden, left "back doors" in the networks to later retrieve data. Love was charged in Britain with violating the Computer Misuse Act, and charged in the United States with accessing a US government computer without permission and conspiracy. US Attorney Paul Fishman, who announced the charges, said the hacking took place from October 2012 until this month. It compromised personal data of US military and information on defence budgets, contract bidding, and the demolition and disposal of military facilities, and caused "millions of dollars of losses". Love lives in Stradishall and was arrested at his home on October 25 by the cybercrime unit of Britain's National Crime Agency and other officials, authorities said. He has been bailed until February 2014. Love, who was also known as "nsh" and "route" and "peace," used internet chat rooms to discuss the hacking and efforts to conceal it. In one chat room, Love discussed the hacking of an Army Corps database that might have yielded 400,000 email addresses, and asked a co-conspirator to "grab one email for curiosity", it is alleged. In July 2013, he bragged about accessing a NASA database, telling another co-conspirator "ahaha, we owning lots of NASA sites," it is also alleged. The alleged hacked systems were found in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, and also included a server containing information about military personnel at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. Love faces up to five years in prison and a fine on each US criminal count, if he is found guilty of the alleged offences. Prosecutors said he faces additional charges in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, stemming from other unspecified "intrusions". |
| Microsoft board member has conflict of interest Posted: 29 Oct 2013 02:34 AM PDT A proxy advisory firm with the unlikely moniker of Glass Lewis has claimed that Microsoft's lead independent director John Thompson has a conflict of interest and should not have the job. Thompson is in charge of the company's efforts to find a new chief executive. Glass Lewis is one of two major companies that make recommendations to shareholders based on corporate governance guidelines. Of course, there is no reason for anyone to listen and many of the big names don't. According to Reuters, Glass Lewis said that Thompson was the CEO of Virtual Instruments, a cloud-computing firm that sells licences and devices to Microsoft. It is not clear why Glass Lewis thinks that this is a conflict of interest now. The mister had been in the job since February 2012 and elected by shareholders at the annual meeting later that year. Virtual Instruments, was paid about $2.3 million last fiscal year by Microsoft for software licences and hardware devices. Microsoft said those buys were negotiated "at arms-length" and at similar terms to Virtual Instruments' other customers. Glass Lewis said Thompson's roles at both companies created a potential conflict, and classified him as an "affiliated" director as opposed to "independent", which it said makes him inappropriate. Otherwise Glass Lewis is recommending shareholders vote to re-elect the company's other eight directors, including CEO Steve "whispering" Ballmer and Bill "Vole" Gates. |
| Apple growth is just so yesterday Posted: 29 Oct 2013 02:31 AM PDT The writing is on the wall for the flash in the pan cargo cult Apple. The outfit announced that it sold only 33.8 million iPhones in its September quarter, which would be good for any other company that did not pride itself on meteoric growth. Stock slid by five percent as shareholders realised that things were not going to get better for Apple for a while. The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had thought that Apple would surprise them and say that all the rumours about cutting back on production were untrue. While chief executive Tim Cook predicted a "really great" holiday season the figures for the last quarter were underwhelming. Revenues from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan climbed just six percent to $5.7 billion in the quarter, despite the 5C and 5S going on sale in September. This figure was supposed to be much higher and indicate that Apple had cracked the Chinese market. Overall sales grew by about 24 percent from the previous quarter, or by about $1.1 billion. That was behind the $1.4 billion that Apple managed to tack on in the December quarter of 2012. Cook, the freshly hatched CEO of Apple, thought results from China were "pretty good" but acknowledged there was room for improvement. What Cook did not talk about was the balls up the company made launching an overpriced iPhone 5C while restricting supply for the more expensive 5S because of the Bosch effect, as we revealed here. Apple expected revenues of $55 billion to $58 billion this quarter. Wall Street thought that would be about right, but they were being gloomy about Apple's prospects. Gross profit margin for the fourth quarter ended September was 37 percent, down from 40 per cent a year ago. That was roughly level with analysts' average 36.9 percent forecast. Apple is finding it very hard to see off its rivals. Strategy Analytics estimated on Monday that Apple's market share slipped to 13.4 percent in the calendar third quarter from 15.6 percent previously, while Samsung led with 35.2 percent. Vassilis Tziokas, Marketing Manager, Upstream said that If Apple wants a larger slice of the smartphone pie, it will need to think long and hard about its current strategy. "Holding onto its premium brand status has so far served the company well, particularly in the West, but now all eyes are on the emerging markets where smartphone use is set to grow at exponential levels," he said. |
| Posted: 29 Oct 2013 02:28 AM PDT The maker of expensive printer ink, HP has sued seven optical disk drive makers, claiming they conspired to inflate disk drive prices for six years. Toshiba, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, NEC, TEAC and Quanta Storage are all in the dock. According to Computerworld, HP said it takes "price-fixing very seriously and intends to pursue its rights aggressively in this and in other price-fixing litigation". The lawsuit claims the conspiracy to drive up prices took place from January. 1, 2004 until January 1, 2010, when "almost all forms of home entertainment and data storage were on optical discs". At the time, the defendants and their co-conspirators controlled more than 90 percent of the ODD market, Meg's company alleged. HP said that the defendants control patent pools that effectively deter entry into the ODD market by jacking up the licensing costs. HP named the 3C DVD Patent Group, which covers patents related to the Blu-ray format, and several patent pools related to CD technology. |
| UK prime minister threatens to censor press Posted: 29 Oct 2013 02:26 AM PDT UK prime minister David "one is an ordinary bloke" Cameron has threatened the British press that he will bring in censorship if they do not do what he tells them. Cameron wants the UK press to stop publishing Snowden leaks, which always show that the US and UK are being total rotters to their allies. Now he has hinted that unless they bow to his will he will do something to stop the presses. According to the Guardian, Cameron said that he would rather "talk to the press" and lecture them endlessly about social responsibility. This is a little ironic as most of the Snowden stories have shown how the US and UK spying organisations are acting without any sense of responsibility at all. Nevertheless Cameron painted a picture of high court injunctions or the use of D notices to prevent the publication of information that could damage national security. He claimed that there were dangers of a "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view" about the dangers of leaks. But he warned it would be difficult to avoid acting if newspapers declined to heed government advice. Cameron told MPs: "We have a free press, it's very important the press feels it is not pre-censored from what it writes and all the rest of it. In other words it is only a free press if it publishes what one says. Cameron has already been in the chilling position of sending black suits around to the Guardian to smash up hard drives and made arbitrary arrests of journalists' partners. It did not change anything because the Guardian carried on reporting NSA files from its New York office. Cameron had said that the oversight of Britain's intelligence agencies may have to evolve. He claimed that he had strengthened the oversight of the intelligence and security committee. The threats to UK press freedom comes after the publication of revelations that the US has monitored the mobile phone of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. That is the sort of thing that Cameron wants to keep from us finding out about. |
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